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Often when we take a selfie, we have a final image in mind.
Sometimes it’ll be easy to make it happen, but honestly a lot of the time, it won’t. Myself included. But is a selfie a ‘failure’ if it’s not what we envisioned?
Only if we are stuck on seeing it that way.
What I’ve found in my own personal selfie journey and what I often hear from participants in Be Your Own Beloved is that we let go of the plan, we open up to a story we didn’t expect to find.
Having a plan for your selfie and not letting yourself off the hook if it changes…only includes what you already know.
It doesn’t make room for the stories that are still unfolding, that haven’t even been put into words yet, that you may simply get a glimpse of in the photo. That you are opening up to seeing.
A tip I got early in my photo adventures was in a studio lighting class at the college here. The teacher said “Just bring some place to begin the photo shoot. It’ll rarely end up actually being what you expected and that’s okay”. And it’s true. There’s a creative flow that happens in a photo shoot and ideas appear in the moment, inspired by what is happening and couldn’t have been planned. It made me think about all the photography in ads out there. That while they may have started with a plan, somewhere along the way things probably changed and that amazing image could have been a happy accident that they captured. It makes it all feel a bit more accessible, doesn’t it…to imagine that photo you love in a magazine or from a photographer might not have been what they initially planned either.
Same with selfies, perhaps even moreso as we are both the subject and the photographer. We don’t have to have a ‘perfect’ plan. We don’t have to know what image we want to take before we take it. We don’t need to do our hair first or change our bodies.
We just need to show up and try.
Honestly, probably only about 10% of my image you’ll see on this site were pre-planned. There is a magic in letting go that we don’t get to experience if we hold on too tightly to a plan.
Another form a plan can take is comparing our photos to other people’s images. Having their photos in mind as what we think ours should look like too. But they haven’t lived our story, they don’t see the world through our eyes.
Being open to experimenting and not knowing how the photo will work out and if we will even like it…can feel vulnerable, but it really is the key to taking photos that we feel the most seen (from ourselves) and to opening the door to photos that really feel like they tell our story, that they have a YOU that you recognize as a friend.